By Matt Waine
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the GAMA Strike – a landmark strike against super-exploitation of Turkish and Kurdish migrant construction workers. For two months, they engaged in determined industrial action against the bosses of their company, GAMA International, facing-down intimidation and threats to their families to win a historic victory, and millions in back pay.
In 1998, then-Minister for Enterprise Mary Harney visited Turkey on a trade mission to invite the construction giant GAMA to Ireland to bid for major state infrastructure projects worth millions. In 2000, the company set up shop here. The Celtic Tiger boom was in full swing and as the economy grew there was a pressing need for infrastructure projects, such as motorways. This period also saw the beginning of vulnerable migrant workers being used to bring about a race to the bottom in workers’ rights, pay and conditions.
Exposing a scandal
In late 2004, Socialist Party Councillor Mick Murphy heard rumours of gross exploitation of migrant workers employed by GAMA. In the period from November onwards, Mick and other Socialist Party members began painstaking work in reaching out to and making contact with several GAMA workers, gaining their trust and confidence. From these contacts, they gained insights into the scale of super-exploitation to which these workers were subjected. They were paid as little as €2-€3 an hour. While the company housed them, their passports were seized, and they were often forced to work up to 80 hours a week.
On 8 February 2005, Socialist Party TD Joe Higgins used the platform of the Dáil, during the questioning of Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, to expose this scandal. The Ceann Comhairle reprimanded him for abusing Dáil privilege and tarnishing the name of a good construction company. However, from this intervention and the media coverage it received, the Government was forced to launch an investigation of the company by labour inspectors.
On 31 March, Joe, along with four GAMA workers, went to Finanz Bank in Amsterdam. There, it was discovered that over €40 million in unpaid workers’ wages were in bank accounts in their names, which they had never known existed. When the workers discovered the level of wage theft word spread like wildfire. On Sunday, 3 April, over 200 GAMA workers from its various sites participated in a meeting at the Teacher Club in Dublin City Centre, where they voted for strike action, elected a strike committee, and established the ‘Turkish Workers Action Group’.
Workers on the streets
The following day, the strike began, with the workers fittingly assembling at the Jim Larkin statue on O’Connell Street, and pickets were placed on numerous GAMA sites. This was a genuinely historic day, the first strike by migrant workers to take place in the state’s history, with workers marching through the streets chanting in their own language, calling out the theft carried out against them by their employers.
The media, the political establishment and the union leaders themselves were dumbstruck. Of particular embarrassment to them was the fact that the workers were in fact members of SIPTU, but had never received a payslip!
GAMA tried to squeeze the workers through intimidation and bullying. Their henchmen approached the families of strikers in Turkey and in Ballymun, and they directed that the catering supplies on which the workers relied be cut. However, the ongoing strike action received wider support from the working class. It was inspiring to see them march through Ballymun and receive enthusiastic support in the form of cheers from the high-rise flats, as well as food and assistance on the picket line.
This was crucial in forcing the state to act with the intervention of the Labour Court in May. Those workers who remained on strike won €8,000 for each day served with the company, as well as a €2,500 severance payment. The GAMA workers, with the assistance of the Socialist Party, wrote a crucial chapter in the history of the workers’ movement in Ireland, and their determined methods of struggle are crucial for today.
